Saturday, July 19, 2014

It’s a skill like another. In large cosmopolitan cities like
New York it is harder to practice.

John Corcoran calls it the art of striking up conversations
with strangers. One suspects that the heightened diversity of a place like New
York causes people to withdraw into themselves. There, a stranger is not just someone
you don’t know. He’s being a potential danger.

In his “art of manliness” blog (via Maggie’s Farm), Corcoran
offers the views of University Chicago researcher Nicholas Epley:

Our
daily lives are guided by inferences about what others think, believe, feel and
want,” writes Epley in Mindwise: How We
Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel and Want. The problem
is, our inferences are often wrong. And it turns out we’d all be
happier if we just talked to one another. The reason? When we talk to
strangers, we’re motivated to show them a happy, friendly version of ourselves. As
the Art of Manliness has hit home before, the way you act changes how
you feel – by acting you become! In other words, if you’re in a
grumpy mood, but turn on the warmth while talking to a stranger, you’ll
start actually feeling a lot better. Interacting with
strangers is a great way to lift your mood.

Corcoran has made the point
before. I have also.

If you want to change the way you
feel, you should change the way you act, the way you behave, the way you conduct your
life.

In the case at hand, Epley
suggests that if we are engaging a conversation with another person, we are
likely to pretend to be in a better mood. The more we pretend to feel better,
the more we will feel better. As they say in AA: fake it until you make it.

Furthermore, and perhaps too
obviously, unhappiness and despair are often the result of feeling disconnected
and disaffected, feeling like a social reject.

How do you cure such feelings of
anomie? By connecting with another human being, of course.

Corcoran’s recommendations and
suggestions are surely apposite. I would only add a point that I argued in The Last Psychoanalyst: connection
begins when two people find common ground.

If you read through Corcoran’s
examples, you will see that he often strikes up a conversation with a stranger
by referring to something they have or see in common, something that is objectively external to both of them: a place, the weather, a pet or work.